Entropy and War
I have a vivid memory of being at a high school Friday night football game sitting high up in the bleachers. I was 16 or 17, I sat next to my mother and her two friends. My whole life was ahead of me, and my mother and her friends were playfully inquiring about what career paths I would take. They made assumptions trying on different designs of who I would become. I sat and listened, and despite an apparent personal feeling they were off, I thoroughly enjoyed their conversation. It felt good to be talked about. “A real estate agent” one said, followed by, “Oh you’d make such a fine realtor, you’re so personable and good at sales!” agreed my mother. Her other friend exclaimed, “A postman, you’re so athletic!”
I don’t recall all the careers they hypothesized would be my life that day, and I certainly have much respect for any and all career paths they brought up. I have many a friend and family who have made honest, respectful, and successful careers out of what was shared, and what my mom and friends wanted for me.
But even now, I can recall not having the words to describe to them what I saw for myself. It would take many years, of which I am still very much in process. And in that moment, maybe driven by my fledgling ego, adolescent angst, or just a deep curiosity that still drives me to this day – what I most wanted to be or understand as my career path were in the people I’d mostly see on the nightly news, that for better or worse, seemed to be the ones making the decisions about how the world ran.
Whether an Army General declaring victory of a battle halfway around the world, a billionaire tycoon who with one deal would crash or save the economy, or a seemingly deranged but charismatic revolution leader. Live camera action, and Anderson Cooper in fatigues covering the sacking of the hard-to-pronounce country’s name’s capital building’s parade as the new dictator declares himself the ruler. Mayhem would seem to reign and I couldn’t stop watching the cheering crowds and assault rifles being shot in the sky from that fuzzy screen. I didn’t want to be Anderson and tell the story, I wanted to be the story. I wanted be able to understand why the story had to be played in the first place.
No, I didn’t want to be greedy, evil, inflict direct harm on others, or necessarily be a billionaire, but what I didn’t understand was that the paths presented to me in my life (however incredibly fortunate, safe, stable, and prone to comfort and success) didn’t resemble the paths of the people that seemed to be the one’s out there in the world calling all the shots. If murder is illegal in my hometown, why is an Army general and his men able to get away with it? If I’d go to jail for stealing why did the baron tycoon get away with robbing the poor? Even sitting there on those bleachers, I couldn’t explain it out loud, and I couldn’t reconcile it in my mind.
I also couldn’t fathom how or why someone would want to attack my way of life, my lands, or my freedom in the way the narrative on the nightly news would often be spun. Do they not see how beautiful this is? Why would you want to take that away? Often now, in my adulthood, I still have those conversations with people who don’t understand war, conflict, dictators drumming up a revolution, or hatred towards their or my country. Who would want to bomb us or inflict terror upon us? They must be evil.
When I was in university, I first learned about the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It states that things tend to go towards their low energy (or high entropy) state. Basically, the entire universe (and Earth) is on an inexorable path toward higher and higher disorder.
I loved learning about that law (considered a foundation of Physics) because there is so much packed into it of how the universe, including how time works – only able to go forward, because of entropy. Fascinating stuff.
But I also couldn’t reconcile entropy through the lens of human ingenuity, and our great developments as the human race. If everything follows entropy, then how can we as a species develop such order and beauty? How can stable jobs be made? and that parents could work hard to provide highly probable often better than they had opportunities for their children. If everything is entropic, then why is my city getting cleaner, more efficient, and more grand? Why am I expected to be richer than my parents thanks to their sacrifices in me?
And that inability to reconcile sat with me for many years. If humans are part of the Earth and universe, then how are we also entropic?
So maybe it was me on a mission to understand entropy and/or what a career path meant that drove me to want to figure out how the world works, and what my place is in it. Who are the ones that get featured on the nightly news (for better or worse)? Why are there refugees? or war? And what about the stable jobs at my fingertips that can be tried on me over a casual football game while someone else in the world is stuck digging ditches, or starving for that matter?
It was definitely both angering and brought sorrow to my parents, rejecting the paths they had sought out for me and worked hard to solidify. But I knew deep in my heart this was a question I ached to resolve.
So I went out traveling, working abroad, and doing all I could to sustain myself for what seemed an indefinite journey of discovery. My intuition was that travel gave me the best way to view myself in the larger context, and through the process of elimination (even if it felt infinite at first), to try to put the pieces together on what the world was, and see if I could remotely answer as to why.
Once I was working in Nicaragua, it was after a decades-long war and a prolonged period of economic depression from the war. As I made my way through strict security and screening, once inside the government building where I was to report to work, I couldn’t help but notice the backside of the building was completely bombed out and exposed to an open field beyond. It seemed to render the security protocols I had to go through useless.
I remember once being alone with a friend high up on the hillsides of the Golan Heights, a controversial annexation by Israel from Syria. When the military trucks would go out of sight, we trundled boulders onto the land mine-riddled field below, hiding in an abandoned bunker hoping we would hear a bang with each rock as it tumbled down the hillside.
I remember sneaking across the border into Brazil, wanting to know what it was like to risk life swimming across a river, and be undocumented in a place. My only real fear was when I had to reverse the experience, across the River Parana and saw how many crocodiles there were. Die doing something stupid once and people call it an accident. Die doing it a second time and people just call you stupid.
Later on I saw a photo on social media of a young boy no older than a toddler screaming and crying, as he was climbing on shore from a raft in the Mediterranean. I was working a desk job in LA. A month later I had quit my job and was living in Greece, with a team of 30 medical professionals, and spending 3 months making 2,000 rescues of refugees, illegally coordinating with human traffickers, but saving lives on the rocky and freezing coastline of between Turkey and Greece. Some of our team would get arrested, others would endure trauma I have never shared with anyone. I balled my eyes out on the flight home, so confused at the horrors I witnessed, and how everyone was just on their iPhones not even aware of the present moment’s suffering and their own privileges. A week later I was the same guy on my iPhone annoyed that my pizza delivery was late.
What I reconciled in this seemingly vast contrast of experiences was that any order created by humans that procures stability, dependability, and probability – all the things we need to smoothly operate a complex and modern society, can only be done so by creating equal entropy somewhere else.
All this order produces chaos elsewhere.
No, we are no different than the rest of the universe. We are just as entropic. Everything we build now comes at the expense of somewhere else, and then later erodes to chaos anyway. It’s a cruel reality to swallow.
The cool air in your air-conditioned house is only exactly how you want it to be, because of the hot air being blasted into the already heating up climate just outside your window to contribute towards the decline of icebergs and polar bears. The airplanes in the sky that safely deliver the executive class commuter that employees me can only do so because of the fracked bedrock and its extracted oil and ecological devastation somewhere else. The telephone poles that bring us dependable power, light, electricity, and the internet can only do so because of the decimated forest that was chopped to pieces to bring us those neatly rowed poles. Energy is conserved and pulled to where it is needed – in our comfortable, modern, ordered lives.
On Earth, and particularly with human beings, I have found there are two states of reality – The first is to live within this system of order (often modern society, a ruling political class, or a developed country) and possess a job required to maintain its function (whether ditch digger, postman, or executive boss), and the second is those that live outside of this order, and feel first hand the compound effects of both their own natural entropy and the ordered world’s natural entropy. Negative effects stacked together mean that war is for survival and its adverse effects are never far away.
This is not to say life within the ordered systems is without strife, suffering, or erosion… because it is, as all of us live and exist within socio-economic systems that decide our roles and will still consume us all to different degrees until we die. But what it is saying, is that for the lives of those outside of the ordered systems, it is nearly impossible for someone who lives within the ordered system to understand the experience of being outside of it. Nor to understand the precarious nature of surviving there. We already suffer within the ordered system, so empathizing with the suffering of those outside of it is almost impossible. And when our news outlets capture this story, the narrative is quickly spun.
Case in point – a Syrian Refugee, where a once fertile crescent is now becoming a desert, exasperated by a changing climate that is accelerated by the entropy overflow of the ordered world’s industrial innovations. The decline of a once great empire being torn into factions, wars, and refugees by the compounding factors of entropy elsewhere.
Climate refugee problems will only accelerate from here, as the ordered world needs further energy to sustain it.
A perceived evil dictator, a people declaring war, or a refugee fleeing out of desperation is all a nuisance to the ordered society, but unbeknownst to its members, is the direct cause of the actions of the ordered world on display as entropy, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics. And it’s not wrong, either, it just is, in an ever ebb and flow of life’s endless interconnectedness.
As I age, I don’t need to be the person on the news who appears to be making the decisions that make the world run. I don’t need that stress, and I am fortunate enough to lead a private life, as most of those roles of people on the nightly news are forced out of desperation anyway. My priorities as a parent have shifted my drive and desire to be more about providing for my family, or the most efficient way that aligns to my skills. And in fact now my “career” feels very traditional, although it hadn’t even been invented yet that day my mom and her friends tried on the assumptions of what I would grow up to be. And that makes my rebellious 16-year-old self kind of happy. 😉
But best of all I’ve made peace with that ache I needed to resolve.